1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a contents processing apparatus and method, and more particularly, a contents processing apparatus and method capable of simply extracting desired scenes from contents and generating a digest of especially important scenes in a short time.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, various contents have been broadcasted in BS broadcasts and CS broadcasts as well as terrestrial broadcasts. In addition, recently, as HDD recorders have become widespread, long-time recording and time-shift replaying have been generally used.
However, since watching time is limited, it is very difficult for users to watch all video. Therefore, a problem to be solved is how to automatically generate a digest of the video and efficiently grasp contents thereof. In these circumstances, there has been developed a digest generating technology capable of watching all the episodes of the contents in a short time by analyzing pictures, sounds, captions, and the like included in the contents, extracting only the scenes likely to be important and replaying the connected important scenes (for example, refer to Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication Nos. 2000-23062, 2005-252372, 2002-344871, and 2005-115607).
In addition, in order to prevent the same scene from being repetitively watched, there has been proposed a method of searching for a portion of the same picture scene (a pattern having the same picture feature) in a temporally retrospective direction with respect to a predetermined scene of the contents (for example, refer to Yashugi Yukinobu, Babaguchi Noboru, and Kitahashi Tadahiro, “Detection of Identical Events from Sports Video by Comparing Camera Works,” Proceedings of The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Vol. 2001, Information System 2 pp. 359-360)
However, the technologies disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication Nos. 2000-23062, 2005-252372, 2002-344871, and 2005-115607 have a problem in that it is difficult to extract important scenes from pictures, sounds, captions, and the like included in the contents because the extraction depends on the details of the contents.
In addition, the method disclosed in the article written by Yashugi Yukinobu, at al., has a problem in that a great deal of time is taken to perform the process of analyzing pictures and searching for the portion of the identical picture scenes.